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A R Ismael Mia

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No one else to blame
17 July 2004

He that is of the opinion money will do everything may well be suspected of doing everything for money…

Benjamin Franklin knew a thing or two about the relationship between money, power and those who will stop at nothing to have control over both.

Birch has left under the same cloud of dust that had not settled after his arrival.  Rumours abound: was he removed?  Did he find the job untenable?  Was he marginalized for suggesting too many changes too soon?  Whatever the debate that will rage over the next week or so, the one fact remains that yet again Everton Football Club has been tarred and feathered as an incompetent gaggle of jokers.

How do you hire someone and then – for whatever reason – allow them to leave in two months?    I am not talking about someone that flips burgers for a living – with all due respect to all the Everton supporting burger flippers – this is not exactly a high profile, skill-specific post to occupy.  But CEO of one of the oldest and best supported clubs in arguably the most popular football league in the world? 

The position should be given to an individual with a track record – and who should have been asked what he intends to do to stabilise the club and where the club would be steered under his potential stewardship.    My point is that the board of EFC should have already been aware of what Birch intended to do with his time at the club – maybe not specifically but a general nuance should be a given.  Therefore, there should have been no surprise if he turned around and suggested selling Rooney, selling shares, getting rid of boardroom loafers – getting more money through giving up ownership.

I will not accept that Birch leaving – so suddenly and with such public swiftness – means that the very changes Gregg is suggesting will take place so readily and as directly as the fans are being led to believe.   There is a saying in Sicily: “…everything has to change to stay the same…”

Everton has been owned by the same group of individuals, there or thereabouts, for two/three decades plus.    Birch coming or going is all smoke and mirrors – the present owners of the club have consistently and persistently pursued the complete control of Everton FC for over a decade . 

Slowly, very slowly, they have inched their way into every aspect of Everton, and I am now firmly of the opinion that the same people that have been making the same bad decisions time and time again over the last fifteen plus years – refuse to accept their bad decisions and worse still, refuse to leave and have in effect cornered complete control.

What to suggest?  Should the fans sit back and watch this close season dissolve further and further into more of a mess?    Where footballing matters on the pitch have gone from the Rooney, to the Radzinski and the last straw must surely be the absurd Savage.

I ask you – does anyone really think that Birch leaving will have any effect on the way Everton does business behind the scenes – or for that matter in the full glare of the media.   Rooney’s prominence has brought the very cameras to Goodison that we have all been bemoaning the absence of, and just as one would have thought that this would be a good thing – Everton slips and slides on a skip full of banana skins.  What is more dangerous than a madman driving a new car?  A madman that is still driving a car that he has regularly crashed over a sustained period of time – with out fail, but this madman truly believes that he has done no wrong and that all the crashes are due to others.

As supporters we all care deeply about the way EFC play football, how the club is seen, how the club runs its affairs.  Well the football sucks, the club is viewed as a running joke and we all know that the days have long gone where Everton would bid for a player and they would sign — remember those days?    A manager would say with confidence that players would choose Everton over any other club in the land – and they would (what a novelty that would be).  No, I am convinced that Everton has something far more dangerous at the wheel of our car; we don’t have a madman – we have something far, far worse.  Everton is run by a zealot.

A self-confessed devotee who spent his last penny to buy the club he supported as a boy – a man that has no more money to put in, but who has edged closer and closer to complete dominance over the club’s affairs so that today nothing happens without True Blue Holdings.  Well True Blue Holdings are holding Everton by the crown jewels, and there is no one left to blame.  Birch has gone, and action is required. 

I am not interested in quick fixes to deflect from the truth which is that Everton FC are bankrupt of money and worse still, bankrupt of ideas.  When the council rejected the idea of money into a ground share – and at the earliest indication of the Red Scum snorting their runny noses – EFC should have issued a statement announcing that EFC no longer wished to negotiate a ground share.  But no, nothing, just the usual silence – Birch or no Birch – everything has to change to stay the same.

Money will not solve Everton’s problems.  Birch could have found as much money as we could have hoped – Gregg can raise as much Scouse cash as he likes – but ultimately who will be in charge of this cash?  Precisely the same people that got us into the cash crisis to begin with. 

Although the editorial voice of this site is cynical of Moyes’s abilities, I still look at his signings as great value for money, but it is the boardroom management I am far from cynical about – they have had way too long at the wheel and we are accelerating towards the cliff’s edge and the brakes are failing.

Independent and Official Everton Supporters, the time may well be coming when we will have to turn on our own, otherwise we will get relegated, and to save the effort of this site’s editors – no one, but no one should be spared if this is the case – because we all fear that it is coming, players, coaching staff, manager – and in my vexed opinion, first and foremost – True Blue Holdings. 

Ken-wright – I now feel very strongly that you are Ken-wrong for Everton FC.  Time to make a sea change in the way you do your business, otherwise you will be the man to own the club as it sinks without a trace, and then there really will be no one else to blame.

A R Ismael Mia

Reader Responses

Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish
Euripides (484 BC - 406 BC)

Firstly let me say that of all the websites available to the discerning Evertonian, I have always relied on Toffeeweb to keep me up to date on the pulse of the supporters, as well as getting my Everton news fresh from the web whilst my time living in the US of A - the wilds of North Eastern Sicily, and the cluttered streets of London Town.

I would also like to respond to the blue balling of my last fans comment, where I lay blame for the present farce-operas squarely at Kenwright's feet — albeit in a "circuitous route"

1. I understand that people are free to leave their job, whenever they want to, I have on many an occasion. However, to leave so soon — and so suddenly, Birch's action highlights the blithering stupidity of the board. Either he was hired without a clear mandate — which is firstly stupid — or he was hired without understanding his future agenda, which is secondly dumb, and thirdly ? he was not given the chance to work out the issues like a working management team should be experienced enough to do — even if you totally disagree with his suggestions after a bedding in period — which is the most galling aspect to the resignation.

2. Gregg is leading the fans to believe that new money will be made available, in his own words he claims that changes will have to be made at the boardroom level. The fans know that this will have to happen quickly for the preseason to be saved, for Moyes to get funding, for Rooney to sign or resign. We all know that at Everton, time moves slowly as though Goodison were caught in a Star Trek time/space warp field ? which explains so much of why the club has consistently reacted late to the present realities of the football industry.

3. In essence the same group of potato faced idiots have been in charge at Everton, the old pass on the torch to the new. Thirty, twenty, ten, five, one year to the day — there is no difference — the club is still run as though it were a Victorian coal mine, deluded and parochial, marginalised and existing in its own world. The quality of the football at Everton has fluctuated between extremes, but the quality of the way the business has been run — we all know the answer to this and it is futile attempting to argue otherwise.

4. So Marcus Bent signed — how many others have turned us down flatly and publicly? How many times can Birmingham be seen as a better alternative to Everton? You cannot surely be saying that because we bid for and signed Bent that this means that we are effective in the market? Remember when players would turn down every other team in the land to join us? Marcus Bent may well prove to be a good signing, because I do believe that Moyes has always signed good players — but the lack of money, the protracted negotiations and the inevitable failure to sign a player speaks far more of the board's ineptitude in my book.

5. Am I announcing an Evertonian Jihad? Strange choice of words, your words — not mine, because that is all I am doing, writing words for a website I respect a great deal. You can mock the quotes, you can put down my style of writing, you can even join the same gang of hooligans that chased me through the New Strand in Bootle because they thought I was wearing a Man City scarf. But you cannot deflect the fact that Everton is owned and run by a group of morons that are devoid of any idea as to how to stabilise the club and how to take it forward. They have no money, they have no idea of how to get money — and now it seems clear that they do not want to hear any opinions of how to get further investment — even from someone they hired to do precisely that [with the proven history of doing so].

To conclude. The term jihad is often distorted to mean "holy war," but it has a deeper meaning. The struggle with our own selves, literally, it means, "exertion" or "to struggle." It means spiritual warfare, to battle with one's own demons in order to give ourselves over to God. I could not give a flying fcuk about religion or religious institutions — but I have always supported Everton FC and I do urge all supporters to voice concern over how the club is run, if you don't struggle for something you believe in — you don't believe.
A R Ismael Mia

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